Social Media Loves Politicians, Fist Shaking Even Better

Michael Hedges April 7, 2014 Follow on Twitter

Around election time every politician squirms a bit. Campaigns are media events, messages of all sorts flying to and fro, crafted carefully by dedicated wordsmiths. Out of their control are the new media vehicles of disruption. It would seem, the little Twitter bird can turn even the most steely politicians to jello.

Turkey’s Constitutional Court lifted (April 3) a nation-wide ban on the social messaging portal two weeks after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered it and YouTube off the country’s inter-tubes. The following day a regional court lifted the YouTube ban after which a regional court swiftly reinstated it.

PM Erdogan ordered the bans because people had posted a bit-torrent of corruption embarrassment, something social media does best, as significant local elections approached. His Justice and Development (AK) party faired quite well last Sunday (March 30). Within nano-seconds of the Twitter ban being lifted Turkish twitterati filled their 140 character windows with charges of election fraud, reported the Financial Times (April 4).

“We are of course bound by the Constitutional Court verdict,” croaked PM Erdogan to a press gaggle, quoted by AFP (April 4), “but I don't have to respect it. I don’t respect this ruling.” Hell hath no fury like a politician denied a victory lap.

“Insults to a country's prime minister and ministers are all around,” he moaned. When the bans were in place, tech-savvy Turks found DNS work-arounds, published gleefully on a variety of websites. PM Erdogan vowed to “eradicate” Twitter at a rally on the campaign trail.

“The Twitter ban is related to privacy,” said Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, quoted by Hurriyet Daily News (April 5), ”while the ban on YouTube is a matter of national security. It should not be perceived as a restriction of freedoms.” The ban stems from a leaked recording of a Foreign Ministry meeting about, allegedly, military plans posted anonymously on YouTube. The Twitter ban started with uploaded audio files that seemed to suggest a bit of high-level corruption, all in the midst of the recently completed election cycle.  An appeal of the YouTube ban by the Ankara Bar Association, in process as the court reinstated the ban, is yet to be heard.

Elections do, indeed, matter. Results notwithstanding, voter turn-out is an obvious measure of political engagement. It’s something the European Parliament, suffering historically from low voter turn-out, would like to improve. MEPs face the electorate in late May.

To get a grip on social media and/or voter engagement the European Parliament (EuroParl) had a special session with speakers invited from the new media realm. Many were from the US, home of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and well-honed get-out-the-vote (GOTV) skills. And most of the political and PR professionals, reported EU Observer (April 2), repeated the message that social media is a politician’s best friend, the Millennial equivalent of shaking hands and kissing babies.

On the other hand, author Andrew Keen challenged all that, as he’s done in the book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture. “What we should remember is that social media is deeply anti-social,” he said to EurActiv (April 3). “It is self-centered. When it comes to being informed, we select to be exposed to what we already (believe).”

Social media hasn’t led to more democracy, he said. “Another aspect is that social media does away with past and future: everything takes place in the present. This is a challenge to politics, because you have an electorate that is suffering from a kind of amnesia. And so the challenge is to always be in the now.”

“The reason people don’t vote is that the EU is so boring and irrelevant to people’s lives,” he continued. “So if you put it on social media, people will simply switch you off. There is nothing magical about social media use. Something that is boring and irrelevant can’t suddenly be made interesting and relevant. In my view, the reason people don’t vote is because they don’t care.”

Social media, he said, is attracted to politicians – like celebrities – who have a single, often raging message. Those “who are marketing a simple idea, like Islamophobia, leaving the EU or burning the establishment… can win in a social media environment.”  Those flame-throwing politicians “then…grab power and become the establishment and so we end up in a destructive cycle.”

That cycle is far from new and hardly distinct in the digital age. Tabloid newspapers and their television counterparts have been feeding election cycles for generations. Some things just don’t change but the internet is forever.

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